The present invention relates generally to broadband and wireless communications and more particularly to remote virtualization of a cellular basestation.
The present invention is employed as an RVS (Remote Virtualization Substrate) that includes architecture for enabling a process for effective virtualization of traditional cellular basestations from a gateway node external to the basestation in technologies such as WiMAX and LTE.
Virtualization of a basestation enables efficiently deploying customized services and protocols with diverse performance objectives in isolated slices on the same-shared substrate. Several interesting deployment scenarios benefit from effectively virtualizing wireless resources. An exemplary scenario including mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs), corporate bundle plans, corporate intranets, evaluation testbeds, and services with leased networks (SLNs), see the diagram in FIG. 1.
Mobile virtual network operators MVNOs are emerging as strong players in the mobile network market to provide enhanced services such as video telephony, live streaming and interactive games (along with traditional voice services) to focused customers. This model is argued to be a win-win situation for both MVNOs and MNOs, since MVNOs help mobile network operators MNOs attract and retain a greater number of customers.
Regarding corporate bundle plans, as revenue from voice services is decreasing rapidly, data services are receiving increased focus from WiMAX, 3G and LTE network operators. Already, more sophisticated data plans for revenue generation on 3G networks have emerged, and are constantly evolving. Many of these sophisticated data plans include corporate bundle plans where the bandwidth is shared across a group of employees of a corporation.
Regarding corporate intranets or evaluation of innovations (testbeds), virtualization can help MNOs and researchers by isolating wireless resources, and providing a way to deploy and test innovative ideas, while running operational networks. This provides a win-win situation for both network providers and researchers.
Regarding services with leased networks (SLNs), in the future, we envision that service providers would be increasingly interested in paying the network operators on behalf of the users to enhance users' quality of experience. For example, one can envision a maps service provider paying a network operator to reserve certain amount of bandwidth on base stations near highways for speeding up user requests.
Past virtualization efforts have focused on 802.11 (Wifi) technology that is not applicable to cellular technologies. One prior work proposed a shaping solution for achieving fairness across flows/slices with single flows. This work does not discuss how multiple flows of different quality-of-service QoS classes within a slice will be able to share the slice resources without interference on the basestation. Wired network virtualization has been done in the past in several ways, but their solutions do not fit wireless networks due to the inherent wireless domain characteristics such as channel fluctuations and capacity variations.
Existing cellular basestations supporting virtual network operators (MVNOs) do not provide any isolation across different operators. They just allow the users of all the operators to access the resources uniformly.
Accordingly, there is a need for improved virtualization of a cellular basestation.